Adventures in .NET Software Craftsmanship!

Ok, so it has been four years since I wrote a blog post, time does fly when you are writing code and chasing deadlines. Anyway, lately I have been feeling the need to revive my blog, most importantly because I have caught the writing bug again and also because I am extremely excited about how the software technology landscape is looking these days, but more about that later. I wanted to focus on what I had to do to get my blog up and running again.

My original blog ran on BlogEngine.NET version 1.6.1, these days there are a lot of better options if you are starting from scratch or upgrading your blog, but mostly out of curiosity and seeking the path of least resistance I decided to stay on BlogEngine.NET and upgrade to version 3.2. The latest version of BlogEngine.NET provides a modern, responsive look and feel that allows readers to use a vast range of mobile devices to browse the content of this site. At the end of day, this was really all I was looking to achieve in this effort, to make sure that the site no longer looked like a Web 2.0 website and that it adhered to modern web design standards.

How I made it work?

Upgrading from BlogEngine.NET was relatively straight forward. I followed the instructions provided at the following link and ran into very few issues. I did not migrate my custom content, scripts, theme, or styles as I intended to switch to a more modern theme.

Important Make sure you run all database scripts necessary to upgrade your database. Including those on the root /setup/[dbengine]/ folder.

Gotchas

Since I did not migrate the original theme the website did not render on the first attempt. Figuring out the problem was not trivial, but the only thing I needed to do was update the settings for BlogEngine.NET by running the following database script to change the theme back to the default.

Conclusion

I am very satisfied with the end result. I did do some additional work that I will be posting about in the near future. Additional work worth mentioning: Enabled Disqus as comment platform, added support for embedded Gist via a BlogEngine.NET extension, added a Social Bar that allows readers to share posts across the traditional social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+).

The Author

Currently a Developer Extraordinaire at InfernoRed Technology based out of Northern Virginia. I have been architecting and building software solutions using Microsoft technology for the past 14 years. I was awarded a Microsoft MVP award for C# in 2007,2008 and 2010 and currently an active participant of the Microsoft MVP reConnect program. I am originally from the Dominican Republic, and the proud father of two beautiful daughters that make my life special. You can track me down on twitter (@hernandezrobert) and on this blog at http://www.overridethis.com.